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Frege on Consistency and Conceptual Analysis† Philosophia Mathematica (III) 15 (2007), 321–346. doi:10.1093/philmat/nkm028 Advance Access publication June 25, 2007 Frege on Consistency and Conceptual Analysis† Patricia A. Blanchette∗ Gottlob Frege famously rejects the methodology for consistency and independence proofs offered by David Hilbert in the latter’s Foundations of Geometry. The present essay defends against recent criticism the view that this rejection turns on Frege’s understanding of logical entailment, on which the entailment relation is sensitive to the contents of non-logical terminology. The goals are (a) to clarify further Frege’s understanding of logic and of the role of conceptual Downloaded from analysis in logical investigation, and (b) to point out the extent to which his understanding of logic differs importantly from that of the model-theoretic tradition that grows out of Hilbert’s work. philmat.oxfordjournals.org 1. Introduction at University of Notre Dame on June 27, 2011 Gottlob Frege is notorious for having rejected, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the then-emerging methodology for independence and consistency proofs in mathematics. The target of Frege’s criti- cism was primarily the use of that methodology in David Hilbert’s classic Foundations of Geometry. Because Hilbert’s methods were undoubtedly successful, and differ only in detail from our own con- temporary means of demonstrating consistency and independence, Frege’s critical stance here has struck some as simply short-sighted or worse.1 I have argued elsewhere [Blanchette, 1996] that Frege had an important point to make in his criticism of Hilbert, one that seems to have been largely lost in the ensuing century. If one understands the relations of independence and consistency in the way Frege does (a way which, incidentally, has something to be said for it), then neither Hilbert’s own, nor more recent model-theoretic, methods are generally successful in demonstrating independence and consistency. Or so I have argued. The central points here are (a) that Hilbert’s † Many thanks for helpful comments to Wilfrid Hodges, to Bob Hale, and to an anonymous referee. ∗ Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana 46556, U.S.A. [email protected] 1 See, e.g., [Dummett, 1975], [Resnik, 1973/4], [Currie, 1982b]. Philosophia Mathematica (III) Vol. 15 No. 3 The Author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permission, please e-mail: [email protected] 322 BLANCHETTE methods demonstrate what might be called a ‘formal’ notion of relative consistency and independence, one that applies to sentences in virtue of their explicit form; (b) that Frege is concerned with notions of consistency and independence that hold in virtue of (sometimes) more deep-seated semantic features of the claims or sentences in question; and most importantly (c) that consistency and independence in Hilbert’s sense do not imply consistency and independence in Frege’s sense. The clearest cases in which a set of sentences (or the claims they express) will be counted consistent in Hilbert’s sense and inconsistent in Frege’s sense are cases in which the inconsistency (from the Fregean point of view) is evident only after a conceptual analysis of some of the sub-sentential components of the sentences in question. For example, the set {Point a lies between points b and c; it is not the case that point a lies between Downloaded from points c and b} is clearly consistent in Hilbert’s sense; whether it is consistent in the Fregean sense is much less clear-cut, and turns on the question of whether further conceptual analysis, especially of the relation philmat.oxfordjournals.org between, will reveal that the first proposition implies the negation of the second. Recently, Wilfrid Hodges [2004] has argued that this account of Frege’s understanding of consistency and independence, and the conse- quent account of Frege’s disagreement with Hilbert, cannot be right. As at University of Notre Dame on June 27, 2011 Hodges sees it, Frege and Hilbert have no disagreement over the role of conceptual analysis in logical investigation, and hence their disagreement over consistency proofs cannot be explained in the way just suggested. The importance of this point is that, if correct, it shows that concep- tual analysis cannot play the role just suggested in Frege’s conception of logic, and that Frege’s rejection of Hilbert’s methodology requires an entirely different explanation. The purpose of this note is to clarify the role played by conceptual analysis in Frege’s procedure, and to argue that Frege’s disagreement with Hilbert is indeed as just sketched. 2. Analysis in Frege: a Brief Overview Conceptual analysis is crucial to all of Frege’s logicist and proto-logicist work. The proofs he offers in Grundgesetze, which were meant to seal the case for logicism, are proofs of highly analyzed versions of arithmetical truths, versions which use the analyses of cardinal number, zero, successor, etc. for which Frege famously argues in Grundlagen. These analyses are what allow Frege to break down the relevant arithmetical truths into their primitive components, and to demonstrate their provability from propositions that explicitly employ only those primitive components. As Frege says in Grundlagen, FREGE ON CONSISTENCY AND CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS 323 ... the fundamental propositions of arithmetic should be proved, if in any way possible, with the utmost rigour; for only if every gap in the chain of deductions is eliminated with the greatest care can we say with certainty upon what primitive truths the proof depends ... If we now try to meet this demand, we very soon come to propositions which cannot be proved so long as we do not succeed in analyzing concepts which occur in them into simpler concepts or in reducing them to something of greater generality. Now here it is above all Number which has to be either defined or recognized as indefinable. This is the point which the present work is meant to settle. On the outcome of Downloaded from this task will depend the decision as to the nature of the laws of arithmetic. [Frege, 1884, p. 5]2 The idea that the truths in question ‘cannot be proved so long as we philmat.oxfordjournals.org do not succeed in analyzing concepts which occur in them’, but can in principle be proven once such an analysis has been given, is the motivation for the central work of the Grundlagen. Frege’s strategy here is to show how such claims as ‘every natural number has a successor’ can be shown to follow from purely logical principles once such central at University of Notre Dame on June 27, 2011 notions as natural number and successor have been broken down into simpler components. It is not just proof from principles of logic (as in Grundgesetze) that is facilitated by analysis; for Frege, the provability in general of a proposition from particular premises can often be demonstrated only after the right analysis has been performed. To have a clear example in front of us, we shall look briefly at an analysis and proof offered by Frege in his [1881]. The relevant passage begins (with our labels inserted for later reference): I wish to prove the theorem that (SUM) the sum of two multiples of a number is in its turn a multiple of that number. ... The numbers whose multiples are to be considered are subject to no conditions other than that the following addition theorems: (P1)(∀m)(∀n)(∀p)((m + n) + p = m + (n + p)) and 2 On Frege’s use here of the word ‘definition’, see §3 below. 324 BLANCHETTE (P2)(∀n)(n = n + 0) hold for them.3 As Frege notes, the result is an interesting one, since the premises (P1) and (P2) are, on the surface at least, surprisingly weak by comparison with the conclusion (SUM) to be demonstrated. Having announced the project, Frege gives his reader a careful analysis of the relation ‘multiple- of’, to the effect that a number n is a multiple of a iff n follows 0 in the ‘+a’ series, with ‘following in the ... series’ cashed out as in Begriffsschrift, and ‘0’ and ‘+’ left unanalyzed. We thereby obtain a highly analyzed version of what is expressed by (SUM), presented via a Downloaded from complex formula which we shall abbreviate as: (SUM)4 (∀m)(∀n)(∀a)((Fol+a(m, 0) &Fol+a(n, 0)) → Fol+a((m + n), 0). philmat.oxfordjournals.org That is: if m follows 0 in the ‘+a’ series, and n follows 0 in that series, then (m + n) does too. (SUM) is then the sentence which Frege derives from (P1) and (P2) with his usual painstaking rigor. In this brief example we have an illustration of Frege’s standard at University of Notre Dame on June 27, 2011 procedure, marked by the following two points which will concern us below: (i) Frege standardly discusses the theorem he is going to prove and, after the fact, the theorem he has proven, in ordinary language, speaking for example in terms of (SUM), and talking about ordinary arithmetical truths, as the things established by his proofs. But the propositions he actually proves are generally the results of a non-trivial analysis of the propositions casually discussed. This leads to the following question: Does Frege in fact take, e.g., the sentences (SUM) and (SUM) to express the same proposition, so that he is to be taken at his word when he speaks for example of his proof of (SUM) as constituting a proof of (SUM)? (Here it is important to keep in mind that for Frege, the objects of proof are not the sentences displayed, but rather the nonlinguistic propositions expressed by those sentences.) Or are we to take him to be speaking somewhat more loosely in such cases, so that analysandum- sentence and analysans-sentence express importantly similar, rather than identical, propositions? As we will see below, Frege is not entirely clear on this point.
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